This is Union Station in downtown Wichita. Its owner has secured a deal whereby future property taxes will be diverted to him rather than funding the costs of government like fixing streets, running the buses, and paying schoolteachers. This project may also receive a sales tax exemption. But as you can see, the owner wants low-income households in Wichita to pay more sales tax on their groceries.
The following was written by local geologist Karma Mason, who also serves on the State Water Board. What are the implications of moving forward with a rushed, poor plan? Mason explains what Wichita voters should consider as they vote in the proposed one cent per dollar sales tax. $250 million of the projected $400 million five-year sales tax is earmarked for a new water supply.
Over the past year, the city of Wichita has evaluated potential new water supply options. Recently, the city revealed enhancement of the aquifer storage and recovery project (ASR) as the preferred new supply. Although ASR enhancement may ultimately prove a viable option, there are still significant uncertainties.
First, a current state-level requirement prohibits the city from using any ASR-stored water should the Equus Beds become stressed during a drought.
Second, we have already spent more than $200 million on the ASR, and it has yet to significantly affect the amount of water stored in the Equus Beds.
Third, in a drought scenario (i.e., dust bowl), the Equus Beds will be over-utilized, resulting in accelerating the migration of the chloride plume to city supply wells. This likely will result in additional costs, beyond the proposed $250 million, to treat the chloride-containing water.
Fourth, there have been recent discussions at the state level about working with irrigators to lease their water rights to the city in a drought scenario, or even establishing a water bank for the area. These options could result in providing needed water in a dust bowl scenario at a much-reduced cost.
Finally, city representatives state that when using existing state guidelines for drought planning, Wichita already has adequate water for another 20-plus years.
Our community has an opportunity to work together to solve its long-term water needs. Fortunately, our current supply is adequate to allow more time for full evaluation of our options.
In this excerpt from WichitaLiberty.TV: Your smartphone is a valuable tool for activism. Here are two ways to get involved. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.
For more on this topic, see Your smartphone is your activism toolkit.
An accessible collection of campaign material will help hold candidates and campaigns accountable.
I’ve started a collection of Kansas political campaign material such as mailers, palm cards, handouts, and door hangers. This collection could be valuable in holding candidates of all parties accountable for their words. Independent organizations may advocate for or against candidates and ballot measures, and these need to be held accountable, too.
It can be difficult to gather campaign material. Some is mailed or distributed only to small geographic districts. Or, material is mailed only to voters with certain characteristics, such as party registration or voting consistency. Unless you live in a “blended” household (with voters of different political parties), you may never see many campaign mailers. While some campaigns may make their mailers or similar material available on their websites or Facebook pages, it’s not common that the negative mail pieces — the ones that often contain the type of distortions that need to be exposed — are publicized by campaigns. (That may say something about negative campaigning.)
You may view the material here.
There are several ways to contribute to the repository.
On your computer. A useful and valuable extension for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers is FireShot. It will save partial or entire web pages in a variety of formats, including pdf.
Printed material. The traditional scanner still makes the best captures. But now many people have a document capture system in their pocket and carry it with them at all times. It’s their smartphones. For information about using smartphones to capture documents, see Your smartphone is your activism toolkit. It’s not difficult to create valuable captures if you have the right app on your smartphone.
Signs, etc. Take a photograph. It’s useful to take a wide shot to show context, and then a close-up to see the detail.
You may send me digital files at bob.weeks@gmail.com. Or, you can send me postal mail at 2451 Regency Lakes Ct., Wichita, KS 67226. I won’t be able to return material you send me unless you include return postage.
Before capturing and distributing material that has your name and address (or other personal information) consider obliterating it with a marker or scissors.
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) discusses federal regulation of hemp, polling on marijuana reform, reasserting the Second Amendment in D.C. and the legislative effort to curtail the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection practices. From Cato Institute Video, produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.
Your smartphone is a valuable tool for activism. Here are two ways to get involved.
Many people wonder how they can be involved in helping to improve government as a citizen activist. It may be that you have a valuable tool that’s in your pocket, and that you take everywhere you go: Your smartphone.
Another thing you can do with your smartphone that is very helpful is to capture documents. Here’s an example. At election time, campaigns and political groups send a lot of mail pieces to voters. Some of these will contain falsehoods or distortions that need to be exposed so that the guilty parties can be held accountable. But much of the time, these political mailings go unnoticed. That’s because a Kansas House of Representatives campaign, for example, covers a relatively small population. Then, campaigns may send mail to only the people they consider active voters, and may narrow down the list using other criteria like political party. Or campaigns may send certain mail pieces to small subsets of voters. So any single campaign mail piece may go to a relatively small number of households.
What can you do to help? Use your smartphone or regular camera to capture documents like campaign mailers. You can do this by simply take a regular photograph with the built-in camera app. That usually works well enough if you follow a few guidelines, and with a little practice you can create documents are are very usable.
Probably the three most important things to remember are to avoid glare, maintain perspective, and crop. If your light source or flash creates glare on the document, the document may not be usable. By perspective, I mean having your camera square and perpendicular relative to the document so that its dimensions are not distorted. (I find that placing the document on the floor and then getting right over it helps.) Finally, cropping removes unneeded parts of the image. Remember, what we’re trying to do here is to create usable documents that can be read. We don’t have to worry about creating archival-quality documents like you would be if you’re digitizing and preserving family photographs.
As I said, you can do this with the regular camera app in your smartphone. But there are specialized document scanning apps. I’ve used several, and one I can recommend is called Scanbot. Another is CamScanner.
When finished, it creates a pdf from the scan. That’s really handy, as you then have one pdf document that holds all pages of the campaign mailer or other document. Then, you can have the app send the pdf by email or upload it to cloud-based storage systems like DropBox or Google Drive. (I recommend both of these systems.)
This type of intelligence-gathering is extremely valuable. Now, you may be thinking “Wait a minute. Don’t political campaigns post their mailers on their websites or Facebook?” The answer is some do, and some don’t. For the negative mail pieces — the ones that often contain the type of distortions that need to be exposed — it’s rare for a political campaign to make these mailers available to the public.
So this is a way you can be involved in gathering information. It could be campaign mailers, political campaign handouts, meeting agendas, material distributed at meetings, things you see on your computer screen, anything. It could be material distributed
I can’t tell you how many times people have complained to me about something they received in the mail or at a meeting. I ask “can you scan it and send it to me?” Well, not many people have scanners in their home. But now many people have smartphones. With a little practice, you can capture these documents in electronic form.
Then, what do you do with these documents? The campaigns of candidates that you support need intelligence like this. News reporters need documents for tips and substantiation of stories. You can share documents on social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can send them to me or your local government watchdog person or organization. There’s a lot you can do.
Government officials at all levels count on the average citizen not being interested or informed about government. We can hold government more closely accountable if we have information, and this a way that anyone can help.
On the Joseph Ashby Show, Susan Estes of Americans for Prosperity-Kansas appeared on August 7, 2014. Bob Weeks is the guest host. We discuss the the goals of AFP and the upcoming Defending the American Dream Summit in Dallas. There are bus trips available from Wichita.
Kansas Republican primary voters made two good decisions this week.
Kansas held primary elections this week. The primary election, of course, does not determine who wins the office; it only selects one Democratic and one Republican candidate to move forward to the November general election. But in many cases, the primary is the election, at least the one that really makes a difference. That’s because in Kansas, often there may be no Democratic Party candidate. Or if there is a Democrat, that candidate may have little money available to campaign in a district with a large Republican voter registration advantage.
It’s important to note that some candidates who will appear on the general election ballot in November did not appear on any primary election ballot. That’s because parties other than Democratic and Republican select their candidates in a convention. In particular, there are two prominent candidates in this category. One is Keen Umbehr, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor. The other is independent candidate Greg Orman, who is running for United States senator. Both are serious candidates that deserve consideration from voters.
Let’s take a look at a few results from the primary election.
In the contest for the Republican Party nomination for United States Senate, Pat Roberts won, receiving 48 percent of the vote. He moves on to face not only the Democratic nominee, but also an independent candidate who is already advertising on television. The problem Roberts faces going forward is the fallout from his scorched-earth campaign. He went negative against Milton Wolf from the start, focusing on issues that are worth considering, but quite trivial considering the big picture.
Roberts ran an advertisement near the end of the campaign that took Wolf’s words grossly out of context, and Roberts should be ashamed for stooping to that level. Another thing Roberts can be ashamed of is his refusal to debate opponents. He said he would debate. He should debate. It’s a civic obligation. He also largely avoided news media.
During the campaign, I was critical of Roberts. I looked at votes he had taken while in the Senate. I looked at the way he ran his campaign. I was critical. I hope that I kept my criticism based on — and focused on — facts and issues. But another problem Roberts has is the behavior of his supporters, both official and unofficial. They too ran a scorched-earth campaign.
I’d like to show you some of the posts made on Facebook and Twitter about Wolf and his supporters, but this is a family-oriented blog. Roberts will need the support of all Kansas Republicans in the general election. He needs to hope that they don’t peel off to the Democrat or Independent candidates. Roberts needs all Kansas Republicans to vote, and vote for him. But the behavior of his campaign and its supporters has harmed Republican party unity. What’s curious to me is that I don’t think they realize the harm they have caused.
For United States House, fourth district, which is Wichita and the surrounding area, incumbent Mike Pompeo won over Todd Tiahrt, 63 percent to 37 percent. This contest was curious for a number of reasons, such as the former holder of the office seeking it again, and running against a man he endorsed twice. It attracted national attention for that reason, but also for something more important: Tiahrt was advocating for a return to the practice of earmarking federal spending. Tiahrt concentrated a few issues in a campaign that was negative from the start.
Tiahrt claimed that Pompeo voted to support Obamacare seven times. But everyone who examined that claim, including several political science professors, said it was unfounded, going as far as saying it broke the truth entirely. The Tiahrt campaign also took a speech Pompeo had made on the floor of the House of Representatives and used just one sentence of it in a deceptive manner. The campaign also took a bill that Pompeo introduced — having to do with GMOs — and twisted its meaning in order to claim that Pompeo doesn’t want you to know the ingredients used in food. Tiahrt criticized Pompeo for missing some votes during the campaign, even though Tiahrt had missed many votes during his own campaign four years ago.
In the face of these negative ads, Pompeo remained largely positive. He released one television ad that rebutted the claims that Tiahrt had made. Is it negative campaigning to rebut the false accusations of your opponent? Pompeo had one ad that mentioned “goofy accusations” made by his opponent, which hardly qualifies as negative. Other than that, the Pompeo campaign remained largely positive. That is quite an accomplishment in today’s political environment.
This campaign was also marred by vitriol among supporters. In my opinion, based on my observations, the Tiahrt supporters that engaged in this behavior have some apologies to make. Pompeo goes on to face a relatively unknown Democrat in the heavily Republican fourth district.
For United States House, first district, which is western Kansas, although the district extends east enough to include Emporia and Manhattan, incumbent Tim Huelskamp was challenged by Alan LaPolice. Huelskamp won with 55 percent of the vote. Huelskamp had faced criticism for not being supportive of various subsidy programs that benefit farmers, most notably for ethanol. Outside groups joined the race, running ads critical of Huelskamp for that reason. Some ads were critical of Huelskamp for being removed from the House Agriculture committee, that move seen as retaliation for not supporting Speaker of the House John Boehner. Huelskamp now moves on to face a Kansas State University history professor who was also the mayor of Manhattan.
What do these results mean? These three elections — Senate and two House contests — attracted national attention. The Friday before the election, Kimberly Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal of the importance of the fourth district contest. She wrote:
A big decision comes Tuesday in the Kansas GOP primary. The Sunflower State is in the throes of political upheaval, with most of the attention on the fortunes of Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts. But the race that may say far more about the direction of the GOP is taking place in Wichita, the state’s Fourth District, in the standoff between Rep. Mike Pompeo and challenger Todd Tiahrt.
Pompeo was elected in the 2010 tea party surge, with a particular focus on liberating private enterprise. He’s made a name for himself as a leader in the fight to end corporate welfare and pork, and to cut back on strangling regulations.
After detailing some legislative activity and accomplishment, Strassel noted the difficulty that fighters for economic freedom encounter: She wrote “Such principles are precisely what conservative voters claim to demand from their representatives. Yet the antisubsidy line has hardly been an easy one, even in conservative Kansas — which collects its share of federal largess. And Mr. Tiahrt knows it.”
Continuing, she wrote: “The choice voters fundamentally face on Tuesday is whether they want a congressman who works to get government smaller for everyone and to end corporate welfare, or a congressman who grabs what he can of big government to funnel to his district, and embraces crony capitalism. The latter is a return to the unreformed GOP, a groove plenty of Republicans would happily slide back into — if only voters gave the nod. We’ll see if Kansas conservatives do.”
There’s something there that bears repeating: “Such principles are precisely what conservative voters claim to demand from their representatives.” In the case of Huelskamp and Pompeo, voters supported two candidates who have these principals, and who follow them. In the United States Senate contest, that almost happened.
Kansas fourth district voters may want to be aware of voting record of a congressional challenger, and whether his criticism of his opponent for similar behavior is hypocritical.
Todd Tiahrt has criticized Congressman Mike Pompeo for missing recent votes. A Tiahrt campaign press release contained: “‘Mr. Pompeo’s job is not to raise money or have political events — his job is to vote.’ stated Todd Tiahrt.”
It’s not uncommon for officeholders to be absent during campaign season. Relevant to this is Tiahrt’s own voting record four years ago. At that time he was campaigning for the United States Senate while serving in the House of Representatives, and he missed a lot of votes.
So if missing votes during a campaign is relevant information that voters might use in making their decisions, voters might want to also be aware of Tiahrt’s record.
More importantly, voters might question a candidate who criticizes another for doing the same as he did. This is hypocrisy, that is, the practice of professing standards and beliefs that are contrary to one’s real character or actual behavior.